Purva Ashadha

Purva Ashadha is the twentieth nakshatra, from 253 degrees 20 minutes to 266 degrees 40 minutes of the sidereal zodiac in Sagittarius. Its Vimshottari ruler is Venus, its presiding deities are the Apas, the divine Waters, and its symbol is a fan or a winnowing basket. The name means the earlier invincible or unsubdued one. Jyotisha reads Purva Ashadha through the swelling, unstoppable power of water and the confidence of the undefeated, the rising flood, the fan that spreads influence, and classes it as Manushya gana. Together with Uttara Ashadha it forms the region the tradition links to invincibility and early or lasting victory. These are interpretive conventions laid over the Sagittarius stars that Indian astronomy assigns to this segment.

Purva Ashadha's padas run through Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. The Apas, the Waters personified, are invoked in the Rigveda as purifying and life-giving, addressed directly in hymns asking for healing and blessing, a comparatively impersonal presiding deity compared to the individually named gods of most other mansions, which some commentators connect to the mansion's own reading as raw, elemental, undirected force rather than force channelled through a particular personality. The name Ashadha also designates a specific lunar month in the Hindu calendar, one associated with the onset of the monsoon in much of India, and the seasonal, water-swollen imagery of both Purva and Uttara Ashadha likely draws on that same calendrical association with the rains rather than existing independently of it.

The nakshatra is not the last cut. Each one is divided again into four padas, and most of what a jyotishi reads from a lunar position is read at that level rather than at the level of the nakshatra itself. Purva Ashadha runs from 253 degrees 20 minutes to 266 degrees 40 minutes of the sidereal circle, and its four padas are three degrees twenty minutes each: the first from 13 degrees 20 minutes of Sagittarius, the second from 16 degrees 40 minutes of Sagittarius, the third from 20 degrees 00 minutes of Sagittarius and the fourth from 23 degrees 20 minutes of Sagittarius. The Moon crosses a single pada in roughly six hours, so a birth an afternoon apart can fall in two of them.

The arithmetic hides a coincidence that is not one. Twenty seven nakshatras of four padas make one hundred and eight divisions of the zodiac, and the navamsha, the ninth-part chart that jyotisha treats as the most important of all the divisional charts, also cuts the circle into one hundred and eight. They are the same cut. A pada is a navamsha, and naming the pada names the navamsha sign without any further calculation. The four padas of Purva Ashadha fall in Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio in that order.

Two cautions attach to those degrees. They are sidereal, measured from a fixed point among the stars rather than from the equinox, so they depend on the ayanamsha chosen to locate that point; the Lahiri, Raman and Krishnamurti values differ by up to about a degree, which is a fifth of a pada and enough to move a chart across a boundary. And the equal arcs are a scheme laid over the sky rather than a description of it: the star the nakshatra is named for sits somewhere inside its arc rather than filling it, and for several nakshatras that identification is itself disputed.